


On Developing a Taste for Sour Berries

by twenty_minutes



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bullying, F/M, Gen, M/M, Other, POV First Person, POV Regulus Black, Regulus Black-centric, Sirius Black-centric, Young Sirius Black, i don't really know how to tag the relationships, regulus sirius bellatrix and some other blacks are all incestuous here, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:22:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27876805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twenty_minutes/pseuds/twenty_minutes
Summary: In my memories, we're still playing in the shadows of the Grimmauld, in the incisions along the walls of the crater that millennia of rain have sluiced into existence. The crevices expand like stretch marks as the crater grows; the rock pillars are polished by meltwater from rough to smooth. But always, in my memories, I'm being drowned and cut open on the jagged seams of our oldest ancestor.
Relationships: Regulus Black & Sirius Black, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Kudos: 8





	On Developing a Taste for Sour Berries

Here, at least, I can try to talk. And in my imagination, you'll try to listen.

\---

In my memories, we're still playing in the shadows of the Grimmauld, in the incisions along the walls of the crater that millennia of rain have sluiced into existence. The crevices expand like stretch marks as the crater grows; the rock pillars are polished by meltwater from rough to smooth. But always, in my memories, I'm being drowned and cut open on the jagged seams of our oldest ancestor.

It's your fault. Bella never gave me even a passing glance until you pulled me to my feet, instead of her.

It's not your fault. I could always trust you to shove her off somewhere high when you caught her picking on me. But I don't know – she may have liked that too.

My most cherished memories are from when it was just the two of us. The first few thousand summers we spent together – before the lesser monkey came and eventually fucking died on us, before you left us. I remember a particularly hot summer that flung itself down like it was throwing a tantrum, kicking up yellow dust, and one midday afternoon, in the burning haze, you brought me to position, close to the core of the Grimmauld. You stood up, and I scrambled to my feet as well. Our shadows thrown small under us, for us to step on. The heat slamming into us from above and below. The thick hum of insect life. You said to try and feel the pulse of the magnetic field, deep in our blood. You closed your eyes as you talked - about orbital mechanics, or something or other. I kept mine open. Watching the flash of your smile, the sharp jerk of your head, the drip of clear sweat, and I think I felt then, like Bella's knife twisting my guts inside me, what Bella always felt for you. Sorry, too much? No, nothing's ever too much when it comes to you.

My first – our first – of the three or four pole reversals in our lifetimes. We were there for nearly four thousand summers, pacing the bottom of the crater. Sometimes, you brought me out to tour. Wherever you walked, rivers flowed towards you, lesser monkeys turned towards you, cathedrals rose out of stone. Your smirk shone out of every stained glass window. I could make things fall apart, but to make them come together was still too difficult. But I told myself to keep gritting my teeth, not to fall too far behind, and sooner or later I'd be walking by your side. I counted, in the privacy of my own thoughts, the summers, the years and the centuries before I would catch up to you. And the summers, the years and the centuries so flew by. Before I could catch up with you, you were gone.

\---

After you left the Grimmauld and before I left the Grimmauld, Cissy and I had quite some time to spend together, avoiding Bella where we could. I was thoroughly surprised by her deadpan humour. She could be a real riot sometimes - mostly when we were commiserating over our elder siblings. Did you know - Bella gets stoned and lynched really often? Stabbed, shot at, fine, but what is she even doing to make entire groups of lesser monkeys turn on her constantly? Oh – do you remember the first time Bella drew blood from us?

Do you remember? You and Bella both loved the first court. You and Bella both loved to wreck it. But the third court was the only one large enough to accommodate the crowd.

You sashayed up to Bella and held your arm out and before she even pricked you – I was watching! – you'd already started screaming your head off. All the lesser monkeys were laughing at you behind their hands! That was so embarrassing. Bella nearly sliced off my arm when she did it to me, and I barely felt a thing! The Malfoys were horrified, I remember. They didn't know either of you lunatics then. Cissy was standing with Lucius at the time and she told him to please excuse the baby in the Grimmauld house. That was the first time I heard Cissy say anything like that. It cracked me up, only I didn't dare laugh with Bella right there.

You never did manage to see how Bella used to slice me up like a potato into french fries. You only ever see what you're looking for.

In my memories, you're pulling me close and warm, rubbing my head and kissing your baby brother gently on the brow. You're bandaging my arm, and berating me for how fragile and careless I am, exasperation making your tone rough, telling me how you – despite your screaming – recovered in no time, whereas hours post-fact, my arm's still broken and limp and bleeding. You ask me why I bang myself up so much.

I say I don't.

You don't ask me about Bella.

So I don't say anything about her.

If you don't look for something, you won't see it. If you don't ask the right questions, you won't get the right answers.

When we leave the third court, you’re stuffing me into one of the lesser monkeys' furry grey coats. The ice age is kicking in, the wind carrying the smell of the glacier as it sweeps over the face of the earth. You're impatient, telling me to hurry up. I say I'm trying. Because I am. I do everything you ask of me, you know. I agree to everything you want to do, including leaving me.

Ironically, only once you were gone, once I stopped walking behind your back and in your shadow, desperate to do what you did, was I able to see what you saw. The phase transitions: sand crystallizing into glass, monkey tribes crystallizing into societies. And the reverse. With increasing density, molecules condense from asymmetry to symmetry; with decreasing density, vaporization forces them back into irregularity. You brought me around to the monkeys' towns and cities so I could see the spatial organization: monkeys coming together in systems wherever they were overcrowded, the glitz of the edifices and the mediums that oiled its operations coming apart when there weren't enough monkeys to sustain them. But I see now what you really meant, when you say they're just like us, but all sped up. I see now what you meant - it’s not just the spatial regularity and irregularity of things, but the temporal one too. The rhythm of the earth. Sand to glass to sand to glass. Tribe to society to tribe to society. That was what you were trying to teach me, and that I only learned from you once you were gone.

That lesser monkey that was Bella's favourite had a tendency to ramble on about hierarchy, and of the superiority of particular kinds of centralized structures, but maybe that's just the nature of short-lived creatures, living too deeply embedded in the temporal matrix. Living unaware of the temporal matrix.

In my memories, I'm crushed under a boulder. You find me later. You always find me eventually, so I can wait. I'm okay, because Bella did this to Cissy before, and Cissy cleared the Grimmauld walls of the heaviest boulders afterwards. But you haven't found me yet, and I can't feel or see anything under the waist. So I'm just lying down, one side of my face a little grubby with soil but otherwise conveniently resting against a stream I sip from every so often.

Upstream, there's a tree with red berries. We ate them once, do you remember? They're so sour that nothing eats them, so they stay on the tree until they ripen and fall, plopping into the creek that carries them to where I'm lying, and I let them go past, even when the hunger’s boring a hole in my stomach – too sour! - to where they finally settle into the silt of the bend further downstream.

The berries take root.

Water turns to vapour, vapour to cloud, cloud to rain.

The berries sprout.

Rain falls - soft as applause, fine as dust - as a tree grows downstream, in the end sagging so heavy with luscious red berries amidst dark glossy leaves. The river brings the seed safely down to the mud, but that’s where its responsibility must end, and where the seed’s begins. In the theatre of my memories, it grows from seed to flower a million times.

And a million times, as the act comes to a close – from stage left, you enter, shouting my name. We all have a part to play, and you are and have always been the best actor I've known.

I remember you made me eat a berry before you rescued me. I didn't cry when Bella got me stuck under the boulder, and I didn't cry the whole time I was stuck under it, but I cried then, when you forced me to eat the berry. That's how horrible you are.

Now the tree is long gone, and so are you. The sun is bloating up into a red giant.

The next act opens, and the show goes on.

\---

I heard that your monkey died from Andromeda. Bella, strangely, didn’t gloat at all. Hers was still alive, then, courtesy of yours truly's blood. Well, not for much longer. There's only so much you can do to prolong a life. We all have our natural lifespans - or rather, lifetimes - to live.

So, anyway, I went to where Andromeda said you were, with no real expectation of successfully locating you, and I met no surprise when I didn’t manage to. I shared a hotel room with a cockroach. She was comfortable company, sitting on the bed beside me. I stayed only a night, petting her, watching and listening to the city - one night was enough for me to understand how you met, and how you spent your time with him. Their lives are so short; there wasn’t much to rifle through.

“Remus” was your sour berry.

Do you remember the sour berries? You were looking for poison, and these berries weren’t it, but they were so, so, so sour. I doubt you remember it, but in all likelihood, that’s where your sour tooth comes from. You were dragging me around to eat desserts forever after that. It was terrible.

So, Remus was your sour berry.

You’ve always had a taste for that sort of thing. You and Bella both. You reshape the world to your whims; you force everyone else to bend at the knee for you, whether they know it or not. Sometimes, when I come back to court, I see Bella sprawled lazily across the settee the exact same way you used to. You look the same from a distance. It gives me the chills. And you both love when something displaces you from the center of your worlds.

You would have loved the thrill of novelty - of a berry so sour, of a lesser monkey in a mental hospital.

You would have loved flirting with the risk. He got unstable, didn’t he? Overworked and underpaid, trapped in a hamster’s wheel of a dead end job. The foster child who made dinner for an abusive father that not only beat him but worse, left dinner on the table for the flies. The college dropout with less than a dollar in his pockets. Medical problems by the boatload.

Bella must have been so, so, so jealous. She would have killed him, if she could find him. He wouldn’t have defended himself. Remus couldn’t even hurt a fly. And how much blood is there on your hands? You didn’t know or care, until you met Remus.

You would have loved the difference between the two of you, that made you different beings. He forgave his father the beatings and neglect, his friends the blame of various crimes, his landlord the exploitation, his society the imprisonment. You’ve never given anyone a second chance in your life. He had a quiet interiority that when let out at rare times had you bursting out in laughter, in delight and astonishment; your thoughts are your actions. He knew shame. You didn’t.

You didn’t drag him along to do what you wanted to do, as you did to me. You treated him like an individual in his own right, and your intimacy was a delineation - a sharpening, not a blurring - of the boundary between you and him, a mutual discovery of your individual autonomy and selves, even as it was being constantly renegotiated. You found yourself in your time with him. He found himself too, it seems.

I watch Remus die at sixty years old. That’s below average, even for a lesser monkey, isn’t it? He looks like a grandfather, with you at his side. You lean your cheek into his wrinkled hand. You, crying; him, dying.

It’s hard to imagine you – well, not _crying_ , but crying for someone else.

I see him at fifty, moving with a premature heaviness of age, stirring soup slowly in the kitchen. He turns the stove off instantly with what looks like practised speed as the front door explodes open and you come barrelling in, launching yourself with a running leap into his arms. What are you doing to such an old monkey? The pot tips and the soup spills anyway, and only then does he start squawking. It looks like cream of something.

He's forty, and you’re walking in silence side by side in a narrow, dirty street. You’re buried in a patchy, beige overcoat that must be his, and he’s shivering in the cold in nothing but a button down and threadbare pants. You’re carrying grocery bags that are full to bursting. Grey is streaking his hair, but yours is black, of course. You’re watching him closely, for some reason, and when he notices, he smiles warmly, and leans down towards you.

He’s thirty, and he’s in a factory, uniformed and sitting at a table, sticking barcode labels on sheets. You’re nowhere to be seen. He’s nodding off, and the floor supervisor hasn’t spotted that yet. Good going, Remus.

You’re in the waiting room at the hospital. Everyone is giving you a wide berth. He’s twenty, getting his stomach pumped. He's not good-looking, even at this age. Average. Plain. And that's for a lesser monkey. There are tubes everywhere. You're striding up, pressing close, barking out something angrily, and apparently he’s conscious and awake - he rolls his eyes, and then you're stifling a grin in spite of yourself.

He’s ten, and he’s diving out of the window with more determination than terror in his eyes while gunshots fire from inside the shabby flat. He misses the sparse shrubbery and lands terribly, and there’s enough blood that a passerby hastens forward. But the passerby isn’t alarmed. It’s you, kneeling down more out of vague curiosity and mild approval than anything. I remember that. I remember you. I can see you much better now.

And here he has his eyes closed. Floating peacefully in a tiny cradle of a womb. His small hands curled up into fists, the way you taught me once, even though there’s no one around to fight. I guess that’s why they’re held loosely, clutched to his chest instead like he's holding a secret or making a pledge. I guess maybe that’s why he looks so peaceful here.

And you?

\---

You remember when Riddle got sick. The commemoration for the alignment of the planets, the attendance of the Malfoys and Flints and Lestranges, the crater warded the heaviest it had been in centuries, and the silly lesser monkey still got sick.

Riddle was standing directly opposite me when he got sick. Did you know that? So I was the first to notice. I had not even a heartbeat to make a decision. That was a bifurcation point, I realise in hindsight.

Look, this is what I thought might have happened if I didn’t instantly step up to offer my blood.

Some of the Flints might have known you and Bella were scuffling, given your liberal infringements of their territory. But Bella always tried to keep it quiet. I doubt anyone knew what you and Bella were fighting about - not even you or Bella. Nothing that involved lesser monkeys, that's for certain. And your disdain of this one was nothing out of the ordinary either. But I know Bella, and so I know Riddle. He wanted stronger blood, he’d failed to ingratiate himself with you, and he would have blamed you for an alleged poisoning. Bella would have known you were innocent of that particular act, but having her image affected on the night of the planetary alignment wouldn’t have been something she could swallow easily. And with your poison vineyards across the continent, yours was the crime of negligence and indifference. She wanted then only the same thing she’s wanted since I can remember: the public pleasure of your support, if not love.

If I hadn’t demonstrated my allegiance, she would have punished me.

She would have punished me for what you did – or didn’t do. I know - knew - Bella like the back of my hand. She’s violent, cruel, headstrong, and the rest of that, but funnily enough, never without provocation. But you, of course, are nothing if not provocative.

I had not even a heartbeat to think.

A split second.

A snap decision.

The offer I made to Riddle in your place.

So in the end, she didn’t punish me. You did. I still don’t know why you left. With you gone, she grew bored of me, and I was glad for that, but I don't know if it was worth it, at all.

\---

Lesser monkeys live and die. Cities rise and fall. Ice ages come and go. The planets move in and out of alignment. Some things always change; some things always remain the same.

I try to improve my approximation of our immediate topology, even borrowing aspects of Cissy's model, because despite the proven stability of the dynamical system, predicting the trajectory of your path to any extent is still beyond me. I miss you, and I’m worried I won’t be able to recognise you when you’re back. You're highly subject to perturbation, after all. You're strange that way.

\---

Andromeda told me she bumped into you the other day. She said you were popping into your mouth berries of some sort, which gave me a shock at first, because I know for a fact that the whole genus died out long ago. But it turns out it wasn’t the same one. Andromeda described it for me.

You’re calmer now, more grounded, she says – you’ve changed, like a lesser monkey. Even Bella never did, with Riddle! And she was moping after him ten times longer than Andromeda said you were moping after your Remus! Why did he change you, and Riddle not change Bella?

All in all, I guess my worst fears came true.

But she still recognised you, didn’t she? And you’re still eating berries - sweet, this time?!

Some things always change; some things always remain the same.

\---

Do you remember? Playing in the shadows of the Grimmauld. Back when Bella tortured me. Back when you protected me. Back when I sat with Cissy by the pool while you and Bella tussled in the sunlight on the rocks.

**Author's Note:**

> thx for reading, will be pleased to hear your thoughts on it, even if you only have negative things to say


End file.
